


Dracula vs Buffy

by beer_good



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dracula & Related Fandoms
Genre: Book: Night Watch, Episode: s05e01 Buffy vs Dracula, Gen, Lost Boys, Meta, Season/Series 05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 14:53:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6859549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alright folks, it's confession time. Ready?</p><p>I like "Buffy vs Dracula." I think it might even be the best season opener the show ever did. Here's some thoughts on why, and how it fits into the larger scope of the series and season 5.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dracula vs Buffy

**Antiquated and Obsolete; Dracula vs Buffy**

The episode opens by setting up what will prove to be the central theme of the entire season, that will culminate with Buffy sacrificing herself to save herself: Buffy _vs_ the Vampire Slayer. Buffy's in bed, restless, Riley asleep beside her. Buffy gets up. Without a word, she gets dressed, goes out, hunts down a vampire, kills it, goes back to bed and falls asleep in Riley's arms. The Slayer and the girl coexist – but not without friction. When they try to have an ordinary picnic the next day, their attempt at a normal(ish) life is interrupted not only by Buffy's supernatural strength destroying their means of entertainment

_RILEY: Buffy slayed the football._

but also by the arrival of what we soon learn is THE vampire above all others – and as is customary, he arrives in a thunderstorm. (I'm sure if the budget had allowed, we would have seen a ship wash up on the beach with the whole crew dead and rats pouring ashore.) Count Dracula's in town.

In a way, though, that's almost by-the-by in this episode; because BtVS was never a show about the supernatural – it was a show about what it meant to be human, using supernatural elements for illustrations. In addition to the opening scene, there's the scene with Willow and Giles.

 _WILLOW: No. It's fine. It's just, you've been Mr. Project all summer. You know? Labeling the amulets and indexing your diaries. I draw the line at making giant rubber band balls. That's when you'll just have to get a life._  
_GILES: That's what I'm trying to do, actually, is, um, get a life._  
_WILLOW: It might go better if you left the house._

"Get a life" seems like a theme here. Season 5 is the season in which Buffy really starts having trouble with being the Slayer. Throughout the whole season, every character is consistently shown to be at least two seemingly contradicting characters; we have Suave!Xander vs Scruffy!Xander in "The Replacement", we have Spike and William in "Fool For Love", we have Dawn as both girl and key, Giles as both father figure and watcher... and obviously, Buffy as both Buffy Summers and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It's the season where we hear talk of death wishes, of hearts turning to stone, where even the Slayer is powerless when it comes to saving her mother. It's the season where the clash between the human and the supernatural not only without, but within Buffy seems to become irreconcilable; where the stakes become so high that she'll have to choose one side or the other – and finally does.

_BUFFY: I knew ... what was right. I don't have that any more. I don't understand. I don't know how to live in this world if these are the choices. If everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point._

It may or may not be a coincidence that when Dracula calls her "killer," she's wearing the same red leather pants she wore when she went to murder Faith. Plus, of course, it's a pretty iconic image; two seemingly irreconcilable versions of the same myth meeting up on a graveyeard in California...

 _DRACULA: We're not going to fight._  
_BUFFY: Do you know what a slayer is?_  
_DRACULA: Do you?_  
_BUFFY: Who are you?_  
_DRACULA: I apologize. I assumed you knew. I am Dracula._  
_BUFFY: Get out!_

(It's hardly an accident that Timur Bekmambetov's film adaptation (or at least the international cut) of Sergei Lukyanenko's supernatural thriller _Night Watch_ includes a TV playing that very scene of "Buffy vs Dracula" right before the film starts expositioning on the nature of light vs dark and how everyone has to choose sides themselves. Iconic indeed.)

Anyway, "Buffy vs Dracula" is, for all its metaphorical angles (and more on those in a minute), primarily a comedy episode. It's very difficult for it NOT to be one, considering how Dracula comes across when you insert him into the Buffyverse.

Bram Stoker originally published _Dracula_ in 1897 (exactly 100 years before BtVS went on the air) and while it wasn't the _first_ vampire novel, it quickly became _the_ vampire novel. Thanks to the success of the book, the play, and the occasional movie (IMDb lists 167 titles with the word “Dracula” in them) Dracula has pretty much become the definition of a vampire, and his rules (as Spike points out in this episode) mostly apply to all other bloodsuckers too. Every vampire story to follow it – and every adaptation of _Dracula_ itself, from Max Schreck to Elizabeth Kostova - may play with the myth that Bram Stoker established, make fun of it, subvert it, invert it, pervert it, reinvent it, amp it up, play it down, parody it, play it straight, modernize it, take it back to basics, build on it, scale it down, fictionalize it, claim it as historic facts, or even try to ignore it completely – but if you scratch long enough at any Western vampire story from the last century, you’ll find some version of Stoker’s evil count grinning at you, still recognizable despite all the attempts to remake him. (Dracula himself, of course, is a heavily remade version of [the real Vlad Tepes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_tepes) – allegedly, Stoker found the name in a book and thought “meh, it’ll do.”) Tvtropes.org calls the phenomenon “[our vampires are different](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurVampiresAreDifferent)” and points out that "a show will usually address the baseline rules even if they're not enforced." That is to say, you’re free to invent your own vampire mythos, but much like Buffy spends a substantial portion of “Buffy vs Dracula” claiming to NOT be under Dracula's thrall you’re still trapped by him, because you're going to have to establish that vampires in your canon _don’t_ fly/are invisible in mirrors/dress in long black coats/talk with a funny generic European accent/lust after English virgins/etc if you want people to accept them as vampires. Which the Buffyverse did years before Dracula turns up.

 _BUFFY: I looked around, but soon's they got clear of the graveyard, they could have just, voom!_  
_XANDER: They can fly?_  
_BUFFY: They can drive._  
_XANDER: Oh._

And vampires in the Buffyverse _are_ different. As monsters go, they’re pretty much ordinary people plus fangs, 86 the soul, with all the same hangups and individual traits as anyone else. They’re not larger than life, the creepy foreigner looking to seduce innocent women and destroy society like Dracula was; they’re very much real, very much IN the world, and the people who still see them as these immensely powerful, mythical, long-lived, lonely Dark Ones... well, they don't fare so well; watch "Lie To Me." BtVS didn’t invent that kind of post-modern vampire - the tag line for _The Lost Boys_ pretty much summed it up 10 years earlier – but they carried it to a logical conclusion far, far away from the castles of Transylvania.

_Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire._

And with this change comes a change in those who hunt the vampires. Buffy is as far from Van Helsing – at least the original Van Helsing – as can be imagined, and Giles doesn’t really resemble him much either, at least not by season 5. Funnily enough, while Stoker’s Van Helsing was happy to use what was then the latest in modern science to defeat Dracula, Buffy largely rejects that. IMO, that ties back nicely to the basic idea of the show: if the monsters are metaphors for what you encounter in the daily course of your life (Joss introduced Spike and Drusilla specifically to have vampires that could interact with Buffy on a personal level) rather than the dangerous Other trying to get inside, then all the technological advances in the world won’t help you if you can’t rely on yourself. Buffy fights vampires hand-to-hand because the show is about her, not about them. As Dracula points out, the darkness is within the person fighting the darkness.

Next to your average Buffyverse vampire Dracula looks hopelessly out of place, and even more so since they don't even try to retrofit him to Buffyverse rules but play him almost completely straight. Pompous, snobbish, a relic from a by-gone age of both the human world and the vampire story, he makes The Master look up-to-date - not to mention that he has powers that no other vampire gets to have. And yet Dracula is _perfect_ for this episode, exactly because he’s not a Buffyverse vampire and doesn’t even try to act like one. Being the original source of the creatures Buffy is destined to fight, the very essence of the myth, nobody is more qualified than him to teach her how they (and she) work – and sow the seed that will end with Buffy rejecting/transcending her own myth, the rules of her own verse, three years later. He is Vampire; hear him ~~roar~~ growl. But at the same time, being a vampire, he's shit out of luck in Sunnydale. Putting it in the parlance of our times, _Buffy_ pwnz _Dracula_. The Buffyverse is so far removed from the Stokerverse that putting the classic Dracula in Whedon's world can never end well for ol' Vlad; there are no victims for him here – just a killer specifically designed to not only to stop monsters like him, but do it with a quip and a pun.

_BUFFY: A guy like you should think about going electric. Seriously._

It's to Marti Noxon's credit that she manages to actually make him meaningful - not really as a threat, but as a guide. Because of course, "Buffy vs Dracula" is the flip side of "Restless," the magnificent character study that closed season 4. While having Dracula repeat some of the platitudes that the First Slayer tried to sell to Buffy might get a little heavy-handed

 _FIRST SLAYER: No friends! Just the kill! We are alone!_  
_DRACULA: We are alone. Always alone._  
_TARA AS FIRST SLAYER: You think you know ... what's to come ... what you are. You haven't even begun._  
_DRACULA: You think you know ... what you are ... what's to come. You haven't even begun._

it doesn't so much repeat the "lesson" as reinforce it. It's one thing to hear it from the myth that's supposed to be on _your_ side, but to hear the same thing from the one you're supposed to be fighting – both from the First Slayer and the first vampire: that the monster and the person fighting it so easily can become one and the same. Buffy doesn't agree, though; she denies them _both_ \- at least for now. It's not the darkness in Buffy, the Slayer fighting alone, that ends up winning the day; it's Buffy Summers and the people around her.

That she can’t kill Dracula – another breach of Buffyverse rules - makes a perverted sort of sense since in BtVS, nothing gets solved easily or permanently just because you learn a lesson; the vampire still exists, the darkness is still there, but you learn to handle it (besides, if you slay The Vampire, you wouldn’t have a show anymore.) If you’re in the vampire business, Dracula will always follow you... but the thing is, and this is something that runs throughout the entire series but especially s5, Buffy doesn’t have to follow _him_ or any old tradition; she can make up her own rules.

 _BUFFY: You're not the source of me._  
_BUFFY: That was gross._

The darkness that Dracula speaks of may be the source of the Slayer, but it’s not the sum total of Buffy Summers. Dracula as a representative of that darkness is necessary to set up the season; Dracula as a person is irrelevant once he's said his piece, and he gets soundly Eurotrashed.

_BUFFY: How do you like my darkness now?_

By contrast, the last episode of the season opens with Buffy fighting a perfectly ordinary vampire, one who's never heard of her or the whole vampire mythology; the absolute opposite of Dracula. That's an archetypical Buffyverse vampire: just an ordinary human robbed of his soul, with no sense of history, no mythical knowledge, no fancy name or title... just the kill. And when he looks at his opponent, he doesn't see another mythical warrior, no "renowned killer" – and so he's dust.

_KID: But you're... you're just a girl.  
BUFFY: That's what I keep saying._

And over the next 42 minutes of that episode, Buffy will struggle once and for all with the conflicting loyalties of the human and the supernatural, the light and the dark, life and death, and when the sun rises over Sunnydale, she will have figured it out.

* * *

 

_Originally written in 2008_


End file.
